Upper house launches new bid to ban NPD

Published: 14 Dec 2012 12:32 GMT+01:00

German lawmakers in the upper house of the German parliament launched a new bid on Friday to press the country's top court to ban the neo-Nazi NPD party, nearly 10 years after an earlier attempt failed.

Lawmakers in the Bundesrat, which represents the country's 16 states, unanimously backed a move to petition the Federal Constitutional Court to outlaw the National Democratic Party (NPD).

Just the western state of Hesse abstained in the vote, which came a week after state premiers announced they supported the move despite Chancellor Angela Merkel still having reservations about its chances of success.

In 2003, a similar attempt spearheaded by the federal government fizzled because the tribunal found that the presence of intelligence agents who had infiltrated the party's ranks muddied the case against it.

The failure stalks the current proceedings, which were prompted by the discovery in November 2011 that a far-right cell was likely behind a rash of killings over a seven-year period in which most of the 10 victims were immigrant shopkeepers.

Merkel last week said the federal government would make up its mind on whether to support a new attempt to outlaw the party "in the first quarter of next year".

"We have not yet formed our opinion. There is an impressive collection of evidence... but on the other hand, there are also, from our point of view, some legal risks," she told reporters.

The Federal Constitutional Court alone holds the power to strike down a political party.

But only the federal government, the Bundestag lower house of parliament, which has also not yet decided on its stance over a new ban bid, and the Bundesrat can apply for such a ban.

Founded in 1964 with the help of former Nazis, the NPD has never won seats in the federal parliament and in 2009 scored just 1.5 percent of the vote - far from the five percent needed for representation.

It currently has deputies in two regional parliaments in eastern Germany.

Your comments about this article

Only for enemies of the German people is 'nationalism' automatically vilified as 'neo-nazism...' This is important because were they (the socialist international ie. SPD, Greens) forced to debate using actual facts the utter emptiness and bankruptcy of their moral position would be readily evident. So, name-calling and ridicule instead, accompanied by censorship.

The birthrate in Germany is 1.3 for every 2 German citizens. The birthrate for ethnic Germans is much lower. In fifty years given the demographic trends Germans will be a minority in their own homeland. This should by rights be the number one political issue in our country, by far outweighing any and all other considerations.

My father's family left Germany because they found the Nazis to be distasteful lower middle class boors. Later, they learned just how far boorishness went with that sort of people. The NPD is more of the same hateful little people. Ban them? Never. You want these people out in the open where you can watch them, ridicule them, and show them up for what they are.

The same is true of the hateful and violent left. If you are not going to put the same bans on them, including any remnants of the KPD and its clones, you are merely being hypocrites. The Communists are far more evil than the Nazis, but cloak it in more politically correct jargon. All or none, Germany-- all or none.

What else should we expect from you? You are so far to the left, communism looks normal, and despite the plethora of its historical failings, and the millions it has murdered, people like you want to flirt with its ideals and experiment with it further.

This month marks the 75th anniversary of the Ukrainian famine, known as the Holodomor, or death by hunger.

Prague, 8 April 2003 (RFE/RL) -- Estimates of how many people died in Stalin's engineered famine in the Ukraine of 1933 vary. But they are staggering in their scale -- between 11 and 15 million people in one year. The Soviets then sealed off the borders of the Ukraine, preventing any food from entering, in effect turning the country into a gigantic concentration camp. Soviet police troops inside the Ukraine also went house to house seizing any stored up food, leaving farm families without a morsel. All food was considered to be the "sacred" property of the State. Anyone caught stealing State property, even an ear of corn or stubble of wheat, could be shot. In the cities, children and adults who had already flocked there from the countryside were dropping dead in the streets, with their bodies carted away in horse-drawn wagons to be dumped in mass graves. Meanwhile, nearby Soviet-controlled granaries were said to be bursting at the seams from huge stocks of 'reserve' grain, which had not yet been shipped out of the Ukraine. In some locations, grain and potatoes were piled in the open, protected by barbed wire and armed GPU guards who shot down anyone attempting to take the food.

Just in China it is now believed that as many as 60 million people may have died because of Mao¦#39;s policies-making him responsible for more deaths than Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin combined.

Few would deny any longer that communism--Marxism-Leninism and its variants--meant in practice bloody terrorism, deadly purges, lethal gulags and forced labor, fatal deportations, man-made famines, extrajudicial executions and show trials, and genocide. It's not "a red under the bed scare" it's a FACT, the Communists are far more evil than the Nazis, they are just far better than the nazis at hiding it. And just wait until Germany is ruled by sharia law - You ain't seen nothing yet.

The president of Germany's Council of Psychotherapists said on Tuesday that there was no reason why the country should loosen its rules on doctor-patient confidentiality in the wake of the Germanwings crash.
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